In 1958 after the re-establishment of the Riga Polytechnical institute the Department of General chemistry was created. The head of the department docent J. Sauka started to organise the development of learning resources for the discipline of general chemistry. The main aim was the development of textbooks. J. Sauka started with descriptions of laboratory practical work which were published by the RPI publishing house. Later the development of books was passed on to the authors of this article. A set of textbooks was published: Chemistry (two editions), Chemistry laboratory works and Chemistry tasks. These four books were approved by the Ministry of Education and were published by the publishing house “Zvaigzne” during the 1980's. This is the only complete set of textbooks for a single discipline in Latvian.